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1st Day of 101 day challenge

Here we are, after my first failed attempt at getting something going online (see here) didn't get going, I am relaunching my Target 5000 plan with a 101 day challenge.

Today is all about claiming your brand and securing my projects on a few key resources.

I briefly covered the reasons behind this yesterday and going forward I will be focusing more on what I'm doing & whether it works etc rather than the reasons behind it all.

Today I am going to cover my first steps in getting something ready for launch to the world. I will be dipping into advice and tips from various sources but today I will be starting off with some guidance from the "Noob Guide To Online Marketing" written by Oli Gardner. This is a 6 month course to teach you how to be an internet marketer, whether you've done it before or not. I won't be following it completely, and anyone can see that a 101 day challenge is a lot less than 6 months so I'll need to move things forward much quicker than they suggest. I'll also pull in ideas from other marketers as I go.

Just to clarify this from the start though, I won't be spending any more than absolutely necessary so anything that suggests spending money on ads, buying traffic, paying for links etc is off the menu. I'll be restricting my spending to the minimum I can get away with, things like hosting & domain names are a necessity, and I may invest in a professional theme or two. Even though creating the look and feel of web platforms is part of what I do every day, I don't want to sepnd days, weeks or even months getting something to look perfect when I can spend about £50 and get something that will work out of the box.

So, day 1's tasks, taken from the first few items in the Noob Guide were as follows;

Claim my brand

Set up twitter

Choose an online email provider

Start to gather emails

I have set up my brand name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + and YouTube. Even if I don't use these straightaway it's important to make sure that I have these under my control for when things start to take off.

I have chosen Mail Chimp as the email provider. They are free to get started with, have tools to help you build and manage your lists and the main reason I chose them is that I have used them in my day job so I know my way around their systems.

After setting these up I have added the email subscribe block to this website so if you want, you can join my list now via the form at the bottom of this page.

What else have I done today?:

Outside of my 1st day tasks on the 101 day challenge I have been creating some opportunities for my Added Zen project which will hopefully lead to some regular work for a former colleague.